Eternal Vacation
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Anyone else would have sworn it was a stone statue and left it at that. A hideous and
demented statue, yes, but a statue none the less. Anyone but me.
Hmm...I see you're confused. I see I should have started a little
earlier, maybe with my name. It's...well, it was Dominick Arden. I was once a specialist
in handling strange, even paranormal matters. To put it simply, some friends and I flew
around the globe sending creatures that had no right to exist in our reality back to hell.
Still confused? Have you ever seen Ghostbusters?
No?
Kami Vanquishers? Yeah, I guess that works. Doesn't have the same
effect though...
Anyway, that's all long gone. Years and years, in fact. My friends
may still be In The Business, but I'm out of it permanently.
The last job I was on involved a beastie called a Malignous. In
its natural form it's an invisible creatures of pure energy, but on our plane of existence
it possess an live insect and mutate it until it's the size of a horse. I cornered it in
an abandoned tenement where it has been feeding on squatters. I was about to signal the
rest of my team when it pinned me and started pumping me full of venom. That's when my
friends arrived and promptly shot large holes in it. They got me to a doctor, but not
before I lost all feeling in my legs. The damage the thing did wasn't permanent, but it
did take me some time before I could walk again.
So my doctor advised I get some rest, and my friends went behind
my back and sent me here. Japan is a nice place, although I can't understand a word the
people say. I was really bored here.
Hey, jeez, I said I was bored, not you're boring! Wow, that's
another thing about you guys, you—but I better stop there. Sorry 'bout that. I mean,
sure, Japan has Kami out the Yin Yang (oops, that's Chinese), but they live in rocks and
don't haunt people.
Okay, getting back to the story...
I'd been drinking a little too much when I found it. I was
looking for a place to vomit and nearly felt off the cliff in my search. I saw this thing
down on a ledge, and, after the nausea passed, I decided to go down and take a look. I
wasn't quite sure what it was, my brain wasn't working right at the time. I descended down
the cliff face, a move that would have been insane if I was sober, and was purely suicidal
in my 'needed state.
The statue was just sitting their, lodged between the cliff
face and a large rock, on the ledge where we are now (no, don't bother looking for it, I
shattered it against the rocks). It was absolutely hideous. A few feet long, kind of
snake-like, with a rounded head that had lots of tiny, finger-like things sticking out of
it. A pair of folded wings came out of the back just below the head, and they looked kind
of like umbrellas. You know, spines radiating out from a central point with a membrane
stretched between them. Beneath the wings were six legs, but they seemed to be jointed up
at the knee, so they folded the wrong way. Behind all that the body extended into a tail
and tapered out to a point.
The thing was cast in a very life-like position, standing on its
hindmost pair of legs, and the front pair thrown against its head like it had been
suddenly blinded. I had no clue what its shape was based on, but I was sure that it had
been modeled from life. The detail on the side that wasn't exposed to erosion was too
fine, from the veins the just barely protruded from the wing membrane to the detail on the
thousands of tentacular filaments that covered the head. The texture wasn't quite like
stone, more like some kind of air-dried clay; the surface resisted pressure and yet it was
still soft. The statue seemed to be eons old; the constant exposure to wind and waves had
eroded away the exposed areas of the outer surface, revealing an equally-intricate
interior, full of organs and even bones.
That was when I began to figure it wasn't a statue. There was no
way that the inside could have been fashioned without it being opened up during the
carving, and that would have left marks when it was closed again. Some prodding with my
utility knife revealed that the detail work on the insides of the organs were just as
intricate as on the outside of the body. No, this thing was more like a mummified corpse
of some ancient creature than a statue, buried underground and exposed when part of its
crypt was sheared off and dropped into the ocean. This was the work of some elder race
that had perished long ago, probably never to be experienced by man. It must have been
unfathomably old to have eroded so much; its exterior as hard as rock.
This dead creature intrigued me. I had never seen or heard of
anything even remotely like it. Immediately I set out to learn as much about it as I
could.
I am possessed of some most—peculiar—gifts. Extra
sensory perception, if you will, but it goes far beyond that. I knew I'd be able to learn
more about this thing through my gifts than I could by any amount of normal research. Of
course, my attempts where impeded somewhat by my increase blood-alcohol content, but I
tried anyway.
I reached out to the statue/corpse and touched it with my mind. I
searched it for the emotional residue of it past life, hoping to gather whatever images
and sensations still lingered.
As I drew nearer and nearer to its core, the impression of a
wrongness grew more and more intense, as if somewhere, deep inside, some element of the
original creature still lived within its frozen shell, something more than just psychic
residue. As I finally reached what functioned as the creature's brain, I suddenly knew
why.
The brain was still alive—and conscious! Inside the frozen,
lifeless shell of a body was a living, thinking brain! It knew full well what had happened
to it, it knew what I was trying to do, and it had other suggestions. It was alone, so
alone, and it needed to talk to someone. Trapped inside its petrified body for uncounted
millennia, the last remnants of the creature's mind needed to know what was going on
around it.
Me, being the fool that I am (which wasn't helped much by my
tanked state), agreed. I sent out a tendril of mental energy into its brain, connected
with its speech center, and widened the conduit until it would flow both ways. Instantly
the creature was alert and talking into my mind.
"My people?" it asked, its question accompanied with
images of others of its kind (in full color and looking more like plants or mushrooms than
statues), flying through interstellar space, mining deep under the surface, and fighting
other plant-like creatures above a different, older earth. "What has become of my
people?" Its need was almost tangible; I suppose that if I hadn't talked to anyone
from the outside world in thousands of years, I would need to know what was going on, too.
I responded to the best of my ability. "I don't know. I've
never seen the sights you show me. My people," I indicated, accompanying my words
with images (clumsily formed; that whole mental projection thing is a lot harder than it
looks, especially when you're drunk) of rush hour in NYC, President Clinton addressing the
Senate, and last week's episode of the Simpsons (a repeat about Sideshow Bob and his
brother Cecil).
The creature must have not liked my answer; either that, or he
didn't like the Simpsons much. His response, surrounded in a cloud of hatred and
indescribable anger, rebounded throughout my mind. "It can't be! I will teach you not
to lie! You will suffer my fate, and maybe in a decade or two you will be ready to tell
the truth!"
The next sending shattered through my mental blocks and flooded my
perceptions. It was of the creature's last sight before succumbing to its petrified form;
a volcanic landscape with a massive, cone-shaped volcano jutting out of it. Lumbering down
the volcano came a massive, bloated form, so hideously and indescribably alien that I felt
something in me snap. I felt my limbs going numb, and when I finally forced the hideous
image from my brain, my skin was already turning to leather. The creature's laughter (and
a whispered name— Ghatanothoa) still lanced through my brain as I threw the
petrified creature off the cliff. I watched it shatter on the rocks below, its body
turning into dust while its living brain exploded against the rocks. That was the last
thing I ever saw in my physical body, as my eyes forced themselves shut, and my limbs
froze in place.
Petrification isn't so bad actually. I suppose that it would be
much worse if I was trapped in my body, but I was lucky. You know, the astral plane is
fascinating if you really get into it deeply. All the layers, the different peoples. But
my family isn't there.
I still wish I could talk to my family. Just watching them in
intangible form isn't enough. They still don't know what happened to me. The damn magicks
that keep my mind alive and thinking keep me from thought talking with anyone except when
I'm in my physical body. Maybe I'll get used to this new state, after a few more
decades...
Maybe. Or maybe I'll end up like the thing that did this to
me—consumed with rage for everything free, and totally insane. God help me, I don't
want to end up like that, smashed to pieces against the rocks, after I have stolen the
freedom from the first person I've talked to in millennia.
Help me. Please help me! To your right is a log. Pick it up. Yes
that's good. Now, hit me with it, in the head, until this blasted consciousness leaves me,
forever. Then I'll be free. Free again, and maybe my family will join me some day...